Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

For business purposes, the analytics side is a very unique part of the APM solution. There are lots of different APM products in this ecosystem, but other than AppDynamics, there is no business insight or very limited capacity. Other APM solutions on the business side are limited. Most of our bank customers and fintech customers use the Analytics side with very high priority.

From the C-level perspective, they mostly do not care about the operational metrics, for example, response time, CPU memory, or different kinds of technical metrics. They focus on the business side. The business impact of their application: Is it good? Is it healthy? Is their revenue increasing or not? Or stable? With the business analytics side, we provide a hundred percent of this business info. Before their end-to-end process, we provide real-time business metrics. 

For example, one of our banking customers uses business analytics to measure real-time ATM transactions, how much their customers withdraw or deposit from the ATM machine, or maybe POS machine, or in Europe, SEPA and SWIFT transactions. Customers manage their transactions from another site. We also measure real-time money transfers.

From each level, for example, ATM side, Internet banking side, mobile banking side. The business analytics side is the further version of an APM product for all APM products.

When you use the full AppDynamics product, for example, analytics and the performance measuring site, when you gather all this information correctly and fully, you can easily talk the same language between business and technical teams.

Most of the issue is not only the exact application problem or response time problem. Mostly, we face the issue of telling this problem or understanding the problem from the business side to the technical or operational team side. We cannot use the transition between this level. So AppDynamics gives us a good approach, good visibility, and a good language for both teams. 

For example, business, operational, software, and database teams use the same language to understand each other very easily. It decreases the meantime to resolution and TTR metrics, for example.

It’s a very centralized solution from the analytics perspective. So, when users expand their licenses, they can expand their visibility. For example, they measure the license count from the analytics perspective, daily transactions. They measure daily transactions, for example. One transaction analytics license gives visibility to one million transactions per day.

So if users want to expand the visibility, if users want to expand their usage of the Analytics site, they need to expand the license also, based on your transactions per day. So it’s easy.

The premise has its own AI capabilities, both on the SaaS and the on-prem side. So, if users want to use this AI feature, other than the other APM product, for example, Dynatrace, users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem application. This means there is no need to communicate with the Internet connection or product owners, only the communication between the data center and the Internet site. So users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem, which is the only solution in the APM ecosystem. For example, the big competitor in this area is Dynatrace. Dynatrace has its own daily static analytics features, which need a source connection. 

So, even if users use an on-prem solution, if they want to use the AI options, they need to communicate with their analytics units via an Internet connection. This is important from a technical perspective. 

Another thing is it’s totally free when users own this product with different kinds of agents. Users can also own these AI features. For example, when someone looks at the Dynatrace site, they need to pay for daily data units.  So it’s cost-based. It’s a transaction-based cost with another product, but in AppDynamics, there is no additional cost. So this is one of the advantages.

AppDynamics and the other APM products are really, really much further than other products. So, with this perspective, there are some minor enhancements that can be made, but for the major sites, there is no negative impact or any alternative application. 

For example, some cosmetic enhancements. We live in Turkey, so we have our currency, we have some number formats, or something like that. Sometimes, we can face issues getting the business metric and using or calculating it because of this format or some locality issue. So, I’m specifically talking about this kind of enhancement to enhance its localization capabilities.

I have been using it for more than 12 years now. I have been using it since the beginning. I use it both on cloud and on-premises. 

More than as an application performance management [APM] site other than AppDynamics, I have used APM products for more than twenty years.

It has been super stable. I can easily rate it a ten out of ten because there is no overhead or something like that. There’s no code application, and no code declaration is needed here, so it’s very superior.

From an analytics perspective, when users expand their visibility, there’s no need to expand the license level other than, for example, there’s no additional code application, no additional technical improvement, or something like that. Users only need to expand the license based on their daily transactions. So it’s super easy.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It has been stable, scalable and manageable. 

In Turkey, we are working with more than 75 different companies. We are also responsible for the EMEA region, including Qatar and Austria. So, these are medium to larger organizations.

This is a global company, so there are lots of different support teams all over.

Positive

I used to work with lots of different APM products in my personal career. More than maybe six different products, for example, Dynatrace, CUI, HP Diagnostic (now Micro Focus APM solutions), and other free APM solutions, open-source APM services I used to work with.

We are an APM company. So we make PoCs with lots of different APM vendors throughout the years. For example, last year, I made maybe three different PoCs with other APM vendors. 

But now, for the last nine years, my personal technical perspective and the customer needs in Turkey really align with AppDynamics because it’s a very unified platform. It’s very easy to understand, easy to use. So because of that, I’ve been working with AppDynamics for the last nine years.

We can divide it into two sections. One of them is the agent-based installation, and the other one is the platform-based.

This is a server-side application, so it has lots of different components. Based on my experience, it is easier than other APM solutions as a platform and data warehouse. But the agent side is very different because there are lots of different applications. 

The agent side includes .NET agent, Java agent, Linux agent, Windows agents. There are different types of products on the agent side. It depends on the agent types you need. But from a general point of view, I used many different kinds of APM products, for example, NetTrace, Riverbed, Eternity, and HP Diagnostics. I have a license here too.

So, the initial setup has been simple for me.

AppDynamics delivered financial benefits to our clients. For instance, we are monitoring the money transfer services’ performance metrics, such as response time, how many calls per minute are in a specific time range, and how many other transactions are per minute in a specific time range. These are the technical metrics, the performance metrics specifically. But we are also measuring their business metrics inside the method parameters for HTTP data collectors. 

So we can get this business metric data easily without any code application. This is a very important part. We don’t need any code declaration or development on the development side. We can measure parameters like the amount of money, the success of their transactions, and other business success metrics from these method parameters without any code declaration.

Another example is a loan team in a bank that measures their loan services from their clients. They track how many applications are processed within a specific time range, the success rate, and the correlation of their performance metrics, such as slowness or error rates, with their business outcomes.

For example, yesterday, they released a new application update to address performance issues. Today, we are monitoring their application performance. After this release, their performance went down, response time increased, and success rate decreased. By measuring these performance metrics, their C-level executives and business teams can correlate these performance issues with business impact.

Normally, there’s a baseline, for example, on Wednesday from 10 AM to 11 AM, where they process ten loan applications per minute. If this release negatively affects the business, they can see that response time is increasing, error rate is increasing, and it is impacting their loan applications. So, instead of processing ten applications per minute, they might only process five or three. They can easily measure this impact on their business.

The pricing is very competitive because the prices depend on the customer and customer priority. Based on my knowledge, if I can correlate the business effect and business opportunity to their price, I would rate it a nine out of ten, with one being not cost-effective and ten being very cost-effective.

I would recommend it to other users. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use the product to optimize application performance by monitoring database transactions and extracting insights for troubleshooting issues.

AppDynamics significantly reduced our organization's Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), enhancing team productivity.

They could align the product strategy to evolve as a complete solution similar to Cisco Observability.

We have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for seven years.

The product's stability needs improvement. They could stabilize the authentication platform. Additionally, they need to improve microservices monitoring and log analytics.

I rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We work with around 100 AppDynamics Database Monitoring customers.

The technical support service team could be more knowledgeable.

The initial setup process is straightforward. We need to deploy the agent on the box and connect it to the controller. There are various deployment options available.

We take assistance from managed service providers for implementation.

We buy the platform's yearly subscription. I rate its pricing a six out of ten.

In one of the scenarios, a retail company encountered transaction failure issues. The problem was not with the card or payment system but the database operations. By utilizing AppDynamics, the team traced end-to-end transactions and identified a database latency problem.

Monitoring the entire end-to-end system allows us to pinpoint performance issues in the database. Tracking the user journey helped us identify the issues between the middleware and the database.

The topology view feature helps in effective monitoring. However, this feature was developed six years ago and still needs to be updated. The application needs broader improvements and reshaping for this particular area.

Database scaling or migration projects play a supportive role throughout the development, monitoring, and troubleshooting phases. During development, it integrates seamlessly with the SDLC. It detects and resolves performance issues, ensuring database availability and minimizing downtime.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

We're a bank. We do use the predictive tools for the different products of the bank and the application which the bank utilizes.

AppD improves the productivity of Application Engineers, development teams, and other integrated items. Slowness or leak issue is a nut for the team now. Also, the team resolves or understands the network and query path every easy and resolves efficiently.

Our application uptime, increased by 10%, and overall productivity up by 30%.

Ticket or issue down by 12% over five years of use and experience.

Open to be applied and test any area and suite.

The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.  

Technical support is helpful.

The solution scales well.

The stability is good. 

We do have a combination of areas that need improvement. We do have the integration, such as end-user integration and experience that could be better. It is not just from the response point of view; it is more from the error and error detection point of view. This is due to the fact that these are all the banking applications as used by the banking staff, not by the end-user directly. Based on the banking staff feedback, based on the staff security or maybe dealing with the capital market, there needs to be some improvement.

They do provide the input growth on a daily basis in terms of what is coming in and how we receive the applications and how many we have. We've now started looking for a particular product that can make sure that it should connect with files and statements inside the product. 

The IO ratio, which we are looking for in terms of a report, is one of the concerns. We do monitor those details from AppDynamics, however, reporting and monitoring could be better.

There needs to be more analytics. That is what we are missing from the tool point of view. We need more information geared more towards helping us in making better decisions. When you do the coding that's for a banking situation or maybe in the incidents or capital market, it becomes very important that how much time I'm investing inside the transaction. A transaction which needs to be carried out for either confirming the payments or maybe either releasing the payments - these kinds of things. What I have seen with the use, as of now, is a bit of a lag when we are running on the global cloud or the public clouds, like Azure or the Google platform. 

Right now, we are fighting between three different stakeholders. With the networks, we have a different chat, with the vendors we have a different chat, and with the application team, we have a different chat. This approach doesn't provide a holistic view. Everyone has their own excuses and everyone has their own reasoning and conditions. 

If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful.

I would say that I have between seven and eight years of experience, hands-on. However, later on in the time frame, over the last four or five years, I have not has as much hands-on experience with the tool. I'm more involved in various solution discussions and strategy building with the platform on top of the tool.

I would say it's very steady and for now, it's very reliable as well. It's stable. We don't have issues with bugs or crashes. 

The solution is very scalable so far in any testing scenario. It performs very well and gives us the expected output which we are looking to improve. 

We are using the solution for more than 600 small and big applications. We have around 78,000 people, including the back-end staff and the development team, that use the solution.

Overall, technical support has been very good. We're very satisfied with their level of support. So far, it's been very good for the bank.

Positive

We have used HPE BSM (now called MF APM). 

Due to these factors, we switch:

1. Costly

2. Implementation complexity

3. Multiple products and Integration

4. Not end-user friendly. 

I was not involved in the initial implementation. Nowadays, the way we approach the teams, sometimes it's very easy when it's an application with a known language like Python or maybe with Ruby or a kind of Java application. In terms of gateways inside the product, sometimes it is very tough, and sometimes it is very easy to get deployed. We're not using any out-of-the-box security. 

We have used model Train for the trainers and enforced all employees with operational training.

We achieve a great number, in terms of applications user availability increase by 30%. In treading, and agents, needs a smooth performance before the market starts. AppD provide a depth to measure any performances challenges, leak issue or even a chain linked issue story.

The pricing is a mixed bag. In some areas they are reasonably priced, however, in others, it's a bit expensive. 

We look for ease of implementation, diagnostics information shared, and controls to the team for working.

We're just an end-user of the product.

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

The deployment model depends on the solution or the size of the product which we are using, as the banks do have private and public clouds. In public clouds, we don't have much of the production instances. It's mainly the development. The free cloud and the cloud environment are completely on a private or in-house, on-premises solution with different ecosystems.

If a proper study has been done, and the solution makes sense for the company, I would recommend the solution. 

I would like to rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That consideration is mainly due to the fact that it covers a large portfolio of the product. It does have support for many other ERP tools. A lot of open customization is available and the product support team can help to customize the product. I've found this tool very useful and helpful on that.

My company uses AppDynamics Server Monitoring for end-to-end application performance monitoring. The solution is integrated with the database managed by back-end and end-user teams.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it automatically gets connected with all the entities. The solution discovers your transactions automatically without any customized configuration class or classes or method declaration, like some of the previous solutions we used in our company. Even for databases and end users, you can connect all the entities without much customization and user intervention, which are a few things I like about AppDynamics.

The analytics portion of AppDynamics Server Monitoring could have been better. In the analytics portion, I could not find a user-friendly interface for querying, and analytics sometimes gives the wrong results, so it is not well connected in the back-end. I feel that analytics could have been better in searching and running the analytical queries.

I have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for five years. My company is a customer of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I don't see any problems in the solution.

Scalability is a problem for my company since we have deployed the solution on an on-premises model. Scalability would not have been a problem if the solution had been deployed on a SaaS model.

My company has around 3,000 to 4,000 users of the solution.

The solution's technical support was good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Though I have experience with Splunk, I would not be in a position to compare AppDynamics Server Monitoring with Splunk since I currently don't use Splunk.

I was also working with a solution named CA Wily. Dynatrace is better than AppDynamics since it offers more features and granularity. Dynatrace is something where I could find that it is better than AppDynamics. With all other solutions in the market, I feel AppDynamics is good.

With synthetic monitoring, Dynatrace is good at giving the data and granularity. Dynatrace OneAgent can be used on any stack irrespective of the platform, which I think is a feature AppDynamics introduced recently. Dynatrace performs better than AppDynamics in the aforementioned areas.

The installation phase of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is pretty easy, and it depends on how we automate the process. The solution integrates with your environment. If you have the pipelines, you can integrate them into your pipeline, the steps for which are well documented by AppDynamics, and since it goes with the application, I don't see there is any downside with the installation. Operation-wise, the product is all okay.

The solution's deployment depends on a variety of factors since, in our company, we don't do manual deployments, so it doesn't take any time for us to deploy it. In our company, we just declare the arguments before the application installation. Whenever there is a new release, the AppDynamics agents will work on the deployment without any issues, so we don't feel a lot of time is taken during the installation phase. When the users are installing the solution manually, it may take quite a lot of time. Our company did not have any dependencies during the product's installation phase, so we didn't deploy it as a central team. A team to whom an application has been assigned is given the steps. My team just helps other teams integrate the playbooks into their environment, and they deploy it themselves, so we don't track the time taken for deployment.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model, so it is a bit difficult because we have to maintain the platform. It would have been easy to maintain if my company had opted for a SaaS platform.

Whether a person would view the solution as a cheap or expensive product depends on how that person negotiates with AppDynamics. In some other organizations, I have seen a different price for AppDynamics Server Monitoring. Though the product may come across as an expensive solution, I have worked with organizations that have negotiated very well on the pricing part with AppDynamics and secured the solution at a very competitive price. In short, the price of the solution is something that depends on how you negotiate with AppDynamics. AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a very expensive product, but if you negotiate well, you get value for money. If you can't negotiate with AppDynamics over the price, you won't get value for money. My company used to make early payments toward the licensing costs of the solution, but now my company has opted for a different licensing model. I am unsure if my company makes additional payments apart from the licensing costs of the solution.

My company is a bank, so we can't we could not go with the SaaS model of deployment, because of which we have some dependencies on maintenance. As a product, it requires a lot of maintenance.

Around six to seven employees do the solution's maintenance.

I would tell those planning to use the solution that when it comes to AppDynamics, the adoption phase has always been a big challenge since people from AppDynamics only install AppDynamics Server Monitoring, and then they forget it. I would tell others to work on the right adoption method and metrics, like VictoriaMetrics or Golden Signals while keeping an eye on optimizing those configurations so that you always get to see the right picture.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

The solution offers a real-time view of the things happening in a database. 

You have a live view of what happens when something goes wrong on the production or support side. You don't have to scramble and do guesswork. We can identify the query that creates the bottleneck or slows the performance of the database system. It can give you points on how to debug and fix the system. 

The solution needs to support IBM products. 

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years. 

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is stable. 

The solution's deployment is easy. 

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is expensive. I rate it a seven to eight out of ten. 

I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a nine out of ten. 

I am the coordinator of the implementation of AppDynamics in our customers' companies. 

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is that we can see all query times. If a particular query is taking too much time, we can alert it. 

For example, for a particular transaction, if it is related to the database we know that the slowness is coming from the database and can see the relevant details. In the application flow map, we are able to see that the flow is going to the database and how much time it is taking. We can understand if the database is responsible for the slowness or not. This also enables us to create a ticket.

AppDyanmics requires better technical people to support the solution. It is not as simple as just implementing and walking away. You need someone to maintain the solution. The day-to-day activities should be less complicated so that anyone can manage them. The administration should not be an overhead.

Our organization has been working with AppDynamics for more than six months.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Customer service and support are okay. They are willing to help and were able to solve our concerns. However, some of the issues we raised took a long time to get the solution. Some issues took several months to resolve. 

The initial setup of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is neither easy nor complex. Our database server is set up on-premise, so we needed to configure a few parameters. Once the database agent part is complete, then it is easy. We just needed to add the database one by one. 

We worked very closely with AppDyanmics through the implementation. They helped us with the configuration. By working with them, we didn't face many technical glitches.

The entire implementation, not only for the database, took three months.

The license for AppDynamics is procured by our customers.

Prior to implementing AppDynamics, we did evaluate New Relic and Instana. 

If you are talking only from the database perspective, I would recommend AppDyanmics Database. It is very helpful because it gives you more insight. 

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a seven out of 10.

We use this solution to monitor our core application's performance, to know what transaction is running an error on transactions in these applications. We are based in Egypt and are customers of AppDynamics. I'm the deputy general manager of the company. 

The solution provides good overall application performance and transaction errors which reflect backend health. It's a user-friendly product and very powerful. It offers good performance and features. 

AppDynamics is very expensive, if it were a little cheaper it would be more attractive to clients. The company has decided not to add any new features to the on-prem version which affects our monitoring work. Because of the nature of our business, we can only deploy the solution on-prem and so we're now at a disadvantage.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

Customer support has a local presence in Egypt. They are very responsive and provide a good service. 

I prefer AppDynamics to the CA or Broadcom applications which I've previously used. AppDynamics is very easy to use whereas ABM was quite difficult. When it comes to technical data collection, they're both very good. Maybe CA ABM can collect more data, but when it comes to the presentation layer and ease of use, AppDynamics is much better. 

The initial setup is easy. 

Licensing is by subscription and AppDynamics is expensive but I believe its main competitors such as Dynatrace, are also expensive.

I recommend this product but am a little concerned for the future given that they are no longer adding new features to the on-prem version. For now, they're supporting the on-prem version and they're releasing security batches, but no new features. It might be worth waiting to see what they decide, it could be that they will move to a cloud-only version. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We worked on the kernel, and being able to monitor our application is important. We have utilized some predictive analysis, and that seems to be the biggest advantage.

The real-time feature provides me with insights into what's happening. It also tells me if there are opportunities.

I still need to thoroughly assess the stability.

I am not very impressed with support. The service could be better.

Neutral

We previously used Elasticsearch. We switched to AppDynamics for its capabilities. In terms of application monitoring, the differences were evident. The shift occurred starting December, over the last six months, and has shown improvements.

We consulted the company for the setup.

The mean time to respond when there are no issues is crucial. It is about finding the right balance. If running transactions, you should be able to respond promptly, which translates into a figure.

End-user licenses are crucial. We have users who require consistent monitoring, and they engage with it daily. This involves desktop usage and professional management. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.